Crude futures fall on US stock build

LONDON (ICIS)--Crude oil futures weakened on Wednesday, wiping out earlier gains, when this week’s US stock figures showed a 1.8m bbl gain in crude oil stocks in the week to 28 October.

The December ICE Brent contract was trading around $111/bbl before the figures were released at 14:30 GMT but fell to $110.78/bbl by 14:40 GMT. The contract reached an intra-day high earlier in the day at $111.18/bbl.

The December NYMEX WTI contract was trading around $93.30/bbl at 14:20 GMT before the figures were released by the Energy Information Administration (EIA), and fell to $93.04/bbl by 14:40 GMT. The December contract reached an intra-day high of $93.79/bbl earlier in the day.

Analysts’ predictions for this week’s US stock figures were that they would show a build on crude stocks of about 1.1m bbl, a draw on distillate of around 1.5m bbl and a draw on gasoline of around 600,000 bbl.

The American Petroleum Institute (API) figures were published late on Tuesday.?xml:namespace>